The present invention relates to a chemical data handling system and particularly to a new chemical data handling system for storing and orderly arranging the structures of compounds or material data within a memory and for displaying such data in the form suitable for application.
In the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, investigators deal with many kinds of compounds, and enormous time and labor are required for the orderly arranging of chemical structure data for such compound and general data If such chemical data can be arranged easily and orderly arranged chemical data can be reedited, the investigators can thus spend more of their time for investigations.
Therefore, advent of data handling system for easily arranging or editing chemical data and also easily displaying the orderly arranged chemical data for investigators has long been expected.
Many investigators in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries prepare for a large amount of compounds and conduct testing of these compounds for the development of a new and useful chemical materials. Since the structure and characteristics of a certain compound can give a hint for trying other samples, the arrangement of test data is very important for investigators. However, an adequate tool for supporting the arrangement of data by investigators has not yet been proposed. Therefore, almost every investigator has recorded data, although it may be a extremely primitive method, by utilizing a notebook or a large size table sheet. However, writing a data table of compounds into a large size paper is inferior from the point of view of effective use of space within the investigation room because a wider area is required to enter necessary items and to post the written table.
Moreover, when data is written in a plurality of pages, all the data cannot be observed at one time. Accordingly, when a chemical structure and characteristics of a certain compound are described an different pages, for example, searching through the different pages is required for considering the relationship between the chemical structure and the compound""s characteristics. Moreover, when a page is turned over, an investigator is inevitably required to take his eyes off from one notable area to another, and therefore the flow of the thinking of investigator can be interrupted.
In any case, many hours and much labor are required for editing the compound data table once generated, and such editing is very difficult.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a new tool for handling and displaying chemical data in order to support the investigation by investigators in the field of chemistry.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a chemical data handling system which is capable of displaying chemical data including chemical structural formulas in the image of a data sheet on a display.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a chemical data display system which is capable of displaying a large amount of data including chemical structural formulas in a selectable multimode in order to support the thinking and analysis from various aspects by investigators in the field of chemistry.
It is an even further object of the present invention to provide a chemical data handling system having an editing function to enable accurate copying of data between data tables generated in the sheet image.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a chemical data handling system having a special expression for the display of chemical structural formulas on the display.
In summary, in order to attain such objects, the present invention stores chemical structural data and general data corresponding to each chemical structure within a memory file based on that correspondence. The chemical data handling system of the present invention is characterized by a display system which displays each data with an image of a table sheet where the chemical structures are arranged in the direction X (or direction Y) and general data items in the direction Y (or direction X). The data table to be displayed on the display has a large scale for allowing the entry of data on many compounds. Accordingly, the total display can be realized by scroll operation. In this case, as the first characteristic of the present invention, the chemical structure display column arranged vertically (direction X) are fixed at the left side of screen, in the case of the lateral (Y) scroll and the remaining data column is scrolled lateral. On the other hand, the case of the vertically (X) scroll, the data item display rows arranged laterally (direction Y) are fixed at the upper side of screen and the remaining data rows are scrolled vertically. In any case, chemical structures are displayed as the key columns.
As a second characteristic of the chemical data handling system of the present invention, a function for displaying a list of all chemical structures entered in the table is also added. The other features and utilities of the present invention will be made obvious from explanation about the embodiment thereof.